Читать книгу Need to Know Fertility, Conception and Pregnancy - Harriet Sharkey - Страница 99

• If you have any medical or obstetric problems, consult your doctor before starting any exercise programme.

• If you have any unusual symptoms when exercising, stop and obtain advice from your doctor.

• Stop exercising if you feel very short of breath, get chest pain, feel faint or dizzy, have a bad headache, or have any vaginal bleeding, or leg swelling, or abdominal pain and seek your doctor’s advice.

If you are not used to regular exercise, start gradually with a low-intensity, low-impact activity like swimming or walking. Begin with a good 15 minutes of aerobic exercise, like walking or swimming three times weekly, and build up to about 30 minutes three or four times a week, and then every day. A brisk 30 minutes of walking, ideally with part of it up hill, three times a week, leads to improvements in fitness within two weeks. This builds up your stamina, which is one of the major objectives of exercising in pregnancy.

Key points to remember when taking exercise are:

• aerobics (exercise that improve the fitness of your cardiovascular system) and strength-conditioning exercises are recommended for pregnancy health, aiming for a good level of fitness rather than peak competitive athletic performance

• appropriate levels of exercise are not linked to pregnancy complications and, in fact, might reduce the risk of certain complications

• after delivery, moderate exercise does not affect breastfeeding in any way.

Before you start each exercise session, it is worth spending four to five minutes on muscle warm-ups. A ‘cool down’ period of gradually declining exercise at the end of the session is also advisable. It is usually best to limit your activity to 15-minute periods with five minutes of rest in between.

Ideally you will have an individual fitness programme that takes into account your age, level of fitness and any other relevant factor, such as a pre-existing medical condition. The target heart rates for aerobic exercise in pregnancy are shown in the table above, but if you are not used to exercise, you should set a target about 60 per cent above your usual heart rate. So, if your usual rate is about 80, a suitable maximum would be about 125 beats per minute.